Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Number 2 | Page 172

people of the world. Even developing countries, often vocal critics of the
World Heritage Program, subscribe and contribute to its basic tenets.
The top-down World Heritage program has also led to the intangible cultural
heritage program from a ���� UNESCO Convention where communities
participate in enshrining what is of value to them. This value is about
processes rather than monuments leading to a listing of intangible heritage
that includes Tango from Argentina and Vedic chants in India. � East Asia
and Sub-Saharan Africa led the movement for intangible cultural heritage,
arguing in part that monumental preservation was Eurocentric.
The brief history of cultural heritage, with its movement through universality,
reveals a European worldview that gets challenged with another, but both
are eventually contained in the universal. This suggests universalism to be a
protean concept.
The Universal and the Particular
The tension and resolution between the universal and the particular shape
the role of art in the contemporary world. The dialectic is often resolved
through an implicit preference among cultural institutions and their elite
for cosmopolitan art and universal ideals. The two UNESCO conventions
on tangible and intangible cultural heritage were resolved through universal
instruments.
Exterior of Tate Modern. Source: Christine Matthews [CC BY-
SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via
Wikimedia Commons
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